What happened
The trial ran in Agusan del Norte province, in Mindanao, with Green Bank of Caraga, and fieldwork by Innovations for Poverty Action. The bank approached regular smokers on the street and invited them to a short survey. Everyone received a leaflet on the dangers of smoking and a sheet of tips on quitting.
Each smoker was then randomly given one of four offers. Two groups were offered CARES, one with a deposit collector who visited each week and one without. A third group could pick a wallet-sized card showing a health harm of smoking, to keep somewhere visible. A fourth group got nothing extra.
Opening a CARES account took 50 pesos, about US$1. Clients could pay in but not take money out, and the account paid no interest. After six months, everyone took a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. CARES clients who passed got their whole balance back. Those who failed, or refused the test, lost it to charity.
About 11% of the smokers offered CARES signed up. The average client paid in about every two weeks and had around 553 pesos after six months, roughly six months' worth of cigarette spending.
Smokers offered CARES were 3.3 to 5.8 percentage points more likely than the comparison group to pass the test at six months, and 3.4 to 5.7 points more likely at twelve months, in tests that came as a surprise. Only 8.9% to 14.7% of the comparison group passed, so J-PAL describes this as an increase of over 35% in the likelihood of quitting. The paper concludes that CARES “produced lasting smoking cessation.”
The cards made no difference to quitting. Over 99% of the people offered one took it, but a year later fewer than half remembered it and knew where it was, and about 5% still used it to manage cravings.
The results have clear limits. Two thirds (66%) of the smokers who signed up for CARES still failed to quit. And the researchers could not tell how much of the effect came from the money at stake and how much from the weekly visits some clients had from deposit collectors.
What it shows
Economists call the problem behind this time-inconsistent preferences. In J-PAL's words, a person may wish to quit in the long run, “but in the moment their preference for a cigarette may outweigh their desire to quit.” In the trial's survey, 72% of smokers said they wanted to stop at some point, but only about 18% wanted to stop now.
A commitment made in advance, with something real at stake, changed behaviour a year later. A reminder of the harms did not.
It also shows the limit. Most people who committed still smoked at the end. A commitment raises the odds of sticking to a decision. It does not guarantee it.
About Unlure
How Unlure uses this
Unlure is built as a commitment that works the same way: the decision you make while calm is hard to reverse later. Protection stays on, and every way to loosen it waits three days.
What is at stake is time. CARES put money on the line. Unlure puts a three-day wait between an urge and every way out, and the wait cannot be skipped.
The CARES result is a fair warning for us too. Unlure raises the barrier. It cannot promise the outcome.
This part describes Unlure. None of the sources on this page studied it.
Sources
- 1.
Giné, X., Karlan, D. and Zinman, J. (2010). “Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract for Smoking Cessation.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2(4), 213–235.
- 2.
J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab). “CARES: Commitment Savings for Smoking Cessation in the Philippines.” Evaluation summary. Read on 19 October 2026.
A wait between the urge and the way out.
Unlure blocks adult sites on your Windows PC or Android phone. Making it stricter is instant. Turning it off takes three days.